RIO DE JANEIRO — The arrival of hundreds of thousands of raucous male soccer fans in Brazil is sparking complaints from residents that tourists are treating host cities like a playground and local women with disrespect.

For the past two weeks in Rio de Janeiro and other host cities, women say they have faced an onslaught of aggressive catcalls and other inappropriate behavior on the streets in various languages.

“They’re so rude, they don’t respect the women here,” said Gabriela Steenbuch, a 20-year-old Rio resident. She said the crude behavior is sapping the joy of the World Cup for her and her female friends who have come to dread encounters with boorish foreign men.

“They think we’re like objects on a shelf, available for them to call as they please, and we have to go or else be grabbed by the arm,” she said.

Brazil has long grappled with overtly sexual stereotypes of its women. Rio, for example, often finds itself on lists of the world’s top sin cities, in part because of its famous Carnival parades in which dancers compete in fantastical costumes that leave little to the imagination.

Such an image is a contradiction in the world’s largest Catholic country, where more conservative attitudes toward sex are growing, especially with Protestantism on the rise. Though Brazilian couples may be more open about kissing and other public displays of affection, traditional values in romantic and sexual relationships still prevail.

Officials have said they want to use events like the World Cup to show the world Brazil is a great place to live and work, and to break the country’s image of debauchery. When FIFA partner Adidas AG started selling t-shirts that promoted the sexual side of Brazil, the nation’s first female president Dilma Rousseff condemned the shirts on her official Twitter account.

“Brazil is happy to receive tourists that arrive for the Cup, but is also ready to combat sex tourism,” Rousseff tweeted. Adidas stopped sales of the shirts following complaints.

One of the shirts said “Lookin’ to Score,” next to a graphic of a woman in a bikini in front of Rio’s Sugar Loaf mountain. Another said “I ❤ Brazil,” with an image of what looked like a woman’s backside in a thong bikini as the heart.

Meanwhile in Rio, local authorities have also shut down brothels in popular tourist areas, including a crackdown on under-age prostitution in Copacabana this year ahead of the Cup.

Still, residents say tourists are aggressively pursuing women out on the street and on the beaches. Marie Lefebvre, an exchange student from California, said she is frequently mistaken for Brazilian and harassed by leering tourists.

The 22-year-old said the unwanted attention has made her feel more uncomfortable during the Cup than anytime during the year she’s lived in Brazil. In one incident, some Spanish-speaking tourists tried to coax her into a car. When she was alone on the beach, a man walked up behind her and whispered into her ear.

“It wasn’t even face-to-face. It was really creepy,” Lefebvre said. In less egregious cases, she said men approach her with lame come-ons such as, “Are you the girl from Ipanema?”

Her Brazilian roommate has decided to avoid the beach altogether during the World Cup “because she knows tourists will take pictures of her butt,” Lefebvre said.

The sexual advances are happening in other host cities, too. In Cuiabá, a Brazilian professor made headlines during the first week of the Cup when she spoke out against men behaving badly. She alleged that some Chilean soccer fans grabbed her arm and humiliated her verbally in Portuguese, shouting “sexy” and singing a suggestive song.

Roseli Isidoro, secretary for women’s issues in the southern World Cup host city Curitiba, said her department has launched an ad campaign to warn tourists to mind their manners.

In English, the message reads “Não means no,” followed by “regardless of where you are from, you must respect our women.”

The department posted 5,000 signs and distributed 5,000 bracelets in popular tourist areas around Curitiba with the slogan in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Russian and German.

“They are welcome, but at the same time they have to respect the women,” Isidoro said. She said she hadn’t heard of any cases of abuse in her city, but noted that many incidents in Brazil go unreported.

Brazil’s hyper-sexual image abroad dates back decades. In 1983, long before he would become governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger narrated a video log of his trip to Rio for Carnival. On camera he ogled “gorgeous mulata bodies,” saying that Brazilian women “move in ways that even a fitness expert like myself can’t believe.” He got one Brazilian woman to suck suggestively on a carrot stick on camera.

Brazilian women say they struggle with objectification from their own countrymen as well. In March, a survey found that more than a quarter of Brazilians thought women who wore revealing clothing deserve to be attacked. The study sparked an online protest, supported by tens of thousands on the Internet, in which women posted photos of themselves naked, holding signs saying they did not deserve to be raped.

“Every woman in Brazil has a story of abuse in the street,” said Brazilian journalist Nana Queiroz, who started the campaign by taking a photo of herself half-nude in front of Brazil’s congress. Tiny bikinis don’t mean promiscuity, she said.

While the struggle isn’t new, experts say a key difference now is that women are pushing back.
Brazil’s feminist movement and efforts over the last decade to enforce laws protecting women and children have helped, said Kelly Regina Santos, who researches women’s issues at a university in Rio de Janeiro.

“There is an image that Brazil is the country of soccer, Carnival and sexy women, that Brazilian women are objects for people to consume. The World Cup intensifies that,” Santos said. “But women have more of a voice today.”

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